It Takes All Kinds

Are you f’ing kidding me? These people really want to use HUMAN BREAST MILK to produce Ben and Jerry’s ice cream? I believe the main argument of PETA is that milking of dairy cows is cruel. Oh, ok, so lets milk humans instead. Wouldn’t want to piss off a cow!

Now, really, if you’re worried about unhappy cows, you need a better hobby. I’m certainly no dairy farmer, but isn’t it true that lactating cows (like humans) need “drained” on occasion? You think cows get cranky from milking? Great. Group about 1,000 lactating women in a huge Ben and Jerry’s milking center and ask them to pump enough breast milk to produce all their ice cream. Talk about cranky! I’d rather deal with the cows. All the Ben and Jerry’s double fudge brownie in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep that group happy! You want cranky, I'll show you cranky!!!

I have recently been looking into the dangers/potential dangers of humans drinking cow’s milk laden with antibiotics, growth hormones, and who knows what else, so this whole concept really grabbed my attention. In fact, I was just thinking about blogging about the $6.24 gallon of 2% organic milk I just bought at Wal-Mart yesterday. I teach grade school kids on occasion, and it’s no secret that there are plenty of 5th graders who are taller and thicker than me, have breasts, moustaches, and the whole nine yards. This HAS to be attributable to something, so I’m going to use non-organic cow’s milk as the cause until I see something else that would make more sense.

I’m still not ready to take that leap into using human milk to commercially produce dairy products that are on the shelves of my local grocer. I just heard something, in fact, on the radio this week about some chef somewhere who is using human milk in his recipes. Apparently, he’s trying to incorporate some of these into menu foods at some restaurant.

No thanks, but I’ll stick to what moos. If I have to pay $6 a gallon for it, so be it. There’s enough outrage about nursing mothers as it is – I can’t imagine how these people would react to this “advancement” in dairy… even La Leche League doesn’t think it’s a good idea. To get those people to agree that breast milk and/or its subsequent use could possibly, maybe, just a little not be beneficial is a statement in itself. I’m gonna go have a bowl of cereal.

The Reason I Love Autumn

Today is the first day of fall, so I thought I'd share with you all my favorite thing about this season. I look forward to seeing this on our favorite channel (Noggin) just about any time now. I need the mp3 so I can put it on my iPod. Pathetic, isn't it?

I Have to Say It...

It’s no secret. I’m an out of the closet Barack Obama – Joe Biden supporter. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had some heated discussions with some very close and respected friends and co-workers about whom I’m supporting. The overwhelming question is, “We hear about all this change he proposes to bring to the country – I want to know what he’s going to do.”

Keep in mind that I cannot recall a time in my eligible voting past that a candidate has revealed letter by letter, line by line their descriptive plan to instill any of the “changes” they have all proposed. With that in mind, my feeling is that wanting change at this point is better than the alternative, and whilst the current Democratic candidate may or may not be able to / have the influence to / have a solid plan to instill such change, at least he’s not happy with the current state of affairs and recognizes that middle class America is in trouble. And he's supported his disapproval of the decisions that have been made in Washington with his record as a Senator. Anyone can shout that they don't like the way Washington is running the show, but I'm sorry, when you've voted for 90% of the things that are at least partially responsible for getting America to where she is today, you're just as culpable as the moron in the oval office. That, in my book, is pretty damn important – and probably is for most of my readers.

Here’s a transcript from a recent political ad put out by the Obama campaign. I’ve added some editorial comments of my own, for entertainment purposes only:

In the past few weeks, Wall Street’s been rocked as banks closed and markets tumbled. But for many of you – the people I’ve met in town halls, backyards and diners across America – our troubled economy isn’t news. 600,000 Americans have lost their jobs since January WITH GAS $4.25 A GALLON, NO ONE CAN AFFORD TO BUY THE PRODUCTS THAT THEY ARE MAKING. Paychecks are flat and home values are falling WE COULD HAVE SOLD OUR HOUSE FOR TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS MORE A FEW YEARS AGO – THAT’S A FACT. It’s hard to pay for gas and groceries and if you put it on a credit card they’ve probably raised your rates ALL I CAN SAY IS THANK GOD I HAVE A STATE JOB. You’re paying more than ever for health insurance that covers less and less I HAVE A BILL ON MY TABLE RIGHT NOW FOR A $350 DEDUCTIBLE THAT I DIDN’T HAVE A FEW YEARS AGO. This isn’t just a string of bad luck. The truth is that while you’ve been living up to your responsibilities Washington has not. That’s why we need change. Real change. This is no ordinary time and it shouldn’t be an ordinary election IT WON’T BE. But much of this campaign has been consumed by petty attacks and distractions that have nothing to do with you or how we get America back on track LIPSTICK ON A PIG – GIMMIE A BREAK. THERE ARE MIDDLE CLASS FAMILIES RIGHT NOW HAVING TO DECIDE BETWEEN A GALLON OF GAS OR A GALLON OF MILK. Here’s what I believe we need to do. Reform our tax system to give a $1,000 tax break to the middle class instead of showering more on oil companies and corporations that outsource our jobs YEAH, LET’S BAIL OUT AIG. End the “anything goes” culture on Wall Street with real regulation that protects your investments and pensions. Fast track a plan for energy ‘made-in-America’ that will free us from our dependence on mid-east oil in 10 years and put millions of Americans to work SOLAR, WIND, E85, BIODIESELS…IF WE CAN READ AN INTERNET PAGE DRIVING DOWN THE HIGHWAY ON A BLACKBERRY, WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE ANY ENGINE RUN ON WHATEVER. Crack down on lobbyists – once and for all -- so their back-room deal-making no longer drowns out the voices of the middle class and undermines our common interests as Americans. And yes, bring a responsible end to this war in Iraq so we stop spending billions each month rebuilding their country when we should be rebuilding ours GET THE FOCUS OFF OF WINNING AND LOSING – WE ARE NOT, I REPEAT ARE NOT GOING TO WIN A HOLY MUSLIM WAR. PERIOD. THE KEY WORD HERE – “RESPONSIBLE” GET OFF THE IDEA THAT WE NEED THEIR OIL. Doing these things won’t be easy. But we’re Americans. We’ve met tough challenges before 9/11, THE DEPRESSION, WWII, THE LIST IS ENDLESS. And we can again. I’m Barack Obama. I hope you’ll read my economic plan. I approved this message because bitter, partisan fights and outworn ideas of the left and the right won’t solve the problems we face today. But a new spirit of unity and shared responsibility will.

For all of the naysayers, here is a little more information…

Maybe someone could enlighten me on what McCain is planning on doing for me, in detail…

Hurricaine: Indiana Style

The official total rainfall in Valpo from hurricaine Ike was 8.9 inches. That was on top of the already several inches that fell just because the day before. I read somewhere that Houston only got a couple of inches total from the storm. They got the wind, we got the rain. Here are a few local pictures Brian and I took on Sunday as we went joy riding to assess the situation. These were all within a few miles of our house, if not at our house. I especially like that little creek that we got in our back yard. Adds value to the property.








In other news. I ended up going BACK to the barn that we left last month because the barn had completely flooded out. The barn was knee deep (at minimum) in water, and the outdoor arena and pastures were under water that was so deep it COVERED the fence. I'd guess in places the water was at least 5 feet deep. They had to evacuate the horses because everything (read: poop) that was in the stalls was now floating about the barn in the knee deep water - not a great environment for storing horses.

So I showed up with my trailer on Monday to give a ride to a couple of the horses that belong to Sandy and Marlette - the two people from the old old barn that I anticipate staying friends with. They brought the horses to our new new barn to temporarily store them there until the flood waters went down in their barn. Something better give... these horse dramas are about to kill me! It could be worse... we could be in Munster...

Very Very Scary...

Scary. That's all I have to say. I hope America is smarter than this... pretty with good hair shouldn't get votes; that's about all that's there IMHO. I could have given this interview. Anyone with even the basic interview/interrogation skills can clearly see that she is spewing out answers from her knowledge of foreign policy and a job as menial as running the country from information she got from USA Today... yikes...

A Moment of Silence...

And a link to the picture rights...

Pretty Damn Impressive

I'm so impressed with myself. I'm definitely no Betty Crocker, but I have actually come up with a quick fall recipe that kicks some serious Betty Crocker butt. My friend Amy and I took the kids (hers and mine) to the orchard last Sunday for a littel apple picking. The kids gathered about a peck or so of apples, so I figured I'd better figure something out to do with them.



Here's my granola bar apple crisp recipe...
1. Slice apple into about 16 or so thin like slices.
2. Put slices in a glass microwaveable dish.
3. Sprinkle with about 1 tbsp of sugar and enough ground cinnamon to cover the apples.
4. Smash up a Nature Valley Oats-n-Honey granola bar and put on top of the apples.
5. Put 2 small pats of BUTTER on top of all of that and nuke for about 3-3.5 minutes.
6. Let cool, mix, and eat- it's stupid hot and stupid good.
7. If you're looking to totally kill your diet, it would be REALLY good with some vanilla ice cream...

Hope you enjoy it! You know I wouldn't have done it if it didn't take like 3 nanoseconds to make...

Biting Insects

Jade got her first bee sting yesterday, and in the most unfortunate of places... right on her eyelid. She was standing outside and the buggar was flying around her face. She really wasn't reacting at all, why should she, it's just a little bug, right? Well, yeah, till now. Anyway she put the back of her hand up to her eye because it was buzzing right around her eye and bam. The son of a gun got stuck between her hand and her eye. Thank God she had her eye closed, or we'd have had a problem. I couldn't believe how ok she was with it. She spazzed for only a minute or two, held an ice pack on it, and was fine. Now she has a huge swollen eye and it looks like we beat her. Oh well, there's a first time for everything...

 

 

 

Things

As many of you probably know, we went to Brown County with the horses for a Labor Day weekend getaway. We got down there on Friday in the early afternoon and were fortunate enough to have gracious relatives that were willing to help out so we could stay till Monday afternoon. Friday was freaking HOT and freaking HUMID. Setting up camp was similar to setting up in Death Valley with 100% humidity. Nonetheless, the cold beer cooled us down, and we had a really nice early evening trail ride to the fire tower. Unlike last year, the horse flies were HERENDOUS but luckily we were prepared with extra blankets to put on the horses butts behind the saddles. If you’ve never experienced a horse fly bite, I recommend you keep it that way. Some of these things seem about as big as small birds and actually draw blood. They’re smart, too, and know to land on the horse right in the middle of the top of the butt or right in between the ears so the tail (or your hand) can’t kill them. We lived though. Again, the cold beer helped. 


It got pretty cool during the night – down to about 60 each night, so that felt good. I think we were the only saps at the whole horseman’s campground with a tent, ya know, camping the “old fashioned” way. All the other people had some rendition of this:



Brian suggested we aquire one of these sometime in the future and I didn’t object. I could live with a mostly solid walled structure, A/C, a kitchenette, table, couch, and possibly even a toilet and shower. They’re like small RV’s with room for horses in the back. Of course that would mean we’d need an actual pick up truck to pull it, too. We’ll see. The used ones are pretty reasonably priced. Just looking, I’ve seen a few (like the one above) priced around $100,000.00 new. Yeah, we probably need to find one QUITE a bit cheaper than that to move forward…

When we got home we were planning on taking the horses to a new barn. The old barn was having management problems and to make a very very long story very very short, I’m pretty sure the horses were missing meals, and I had visited more than once when their water buckets were bone dry and their stalls were full of poo. Definitely NOT what we were paying for. Anyway. We got to the new barn (that will hereinafter be referred to as the old-new barn – read on) and got the horses in. My gelding Harley (Monkey #4) got stalled next to the owner’s stallion. He is an enormous warm-blood, really pretty, but well, really crazy. They had actually custom built this stall for this horse – he was so huge and so crazy that he LITERALLY climbed up the stall wall (really hard to do for an animal with no thumbs…) put his front feet on the top of the stall wall, and stuck his head and neck OVER the top of the stall wall, into Harley’s stall.

If you’ve seen Harley, you’d quickly learn his favorite thing to do is sleep and eat. This giant horse coming over the top of his stall freaked him right out. I’m sure he thought he was going to die. So that’s how things started. Then we got a copy of the boarding contract. Line 3, paragraph one, “All riders shall wear helmets whenever mounted.”

I haven’t worn a helmet since my horse and pony days in 4-H. Not that it’s not a good idea – believe me, I understand the inherent danger in horseback riding. I’ve fallen on my head enough to know first hand in fact. I asked if the helmet law applied to kids or to adults, too. The owner looked at me, appalled, and exclaimed, “You don’t wear helmets?” Uh, yeah, not so much. Remember, my horse’s favorite thing to do is sleep. I’ll take the risk I suppose to avoid feeling like a 10 year old in pony club. But alas, the policy applies (well, applied) to all. It’s something I suppose I could have gotten used to and lived with, but for Brian, not so much. We park the horse trailer there, get into the truck to leave and the first comment is, “Well, let’s get finding another place.” Mind you we’ve been at the old-new place for precisely 17 minutes. After a huge “discussion” we agreed to find a new place. The next morning I hurriedly travelled to a couple barns that we hadn’t explored in our initial barn hunt. I found one that looked promising and asked the owner if we could come in in like, 10 minutes. She said that was fine.

Now I had to go to the old-new barn and tell them that we were refusing to wear helmets, be lectured about helmets, or be treated like we are incapable of weighing risk vs. benefit on our own. We were told the contract said unless we gave 35 days notice of leaving there would be a $200 fee per stall to leave. They were so nice, they agreed to just $200 for both, instead of the otherwise $400 dollars to leave after, oh, about 18 hours of being there. I like my money, and I like it even better when I’m not giving it away for nothing. I plead my case that can’t we just call this a mistake and wipe the slate – no hard feelings. Just let me come get my horses and we’ll call it a day. Angrily, I was told, “Just come get your horses.” Mind you, it’s about 1 in the afternoon at this point and Vincent was getting off the bus in 2.5 hours.

I flew home, picked up the truck and drove to the old-new barn to hitch up the trailer. Remember back in the first part of the post where I said we left the trailer there? Well, we unhitched it with all of our Brown County shit (total about 300 pounds) in the cargo area. The trailer was up as high as it would go, but now, with the truck empty, the back end of the truck was about 3 inches TOO HIGH to hitch up to the trailer. And there is NO WAY I was going to lift it. This has happened before, but Brian just stood on the bumper and bounced to get the truck low enough. The problem was this time, I was by myself and while I can do a lot of things, I can’t drive and bounce on the back of the truck at the same time. It was about 95 degrees that day, and I’m out there in tears at this point. Hot, frustrated, upset, pissed – it was a beautiful sight let me tell you.

So the irate old-new barn owner came out seeing that I was about to have a breakdown and apologized for yelling at me on the phone and offered to help hitch the trailer. His help was graciously accepted, as I was really in a time crunch now. I got my stuff and my horses and left.

Oh yeah, I lost my cell phone somewhere in the process, too, to top it all off.

I called the new-new barn and told them I’d be there in t-10 minutes. Luckily they were ready for us. I pulled in, dropped my horses, and left. They must have been wondering, “Who are these crazy people?” I don’t blame them, though. That would have been my impression too.

Are you liking my post? This is just the beginning.

So I get home and get showered up. Brian was already gone for work. By the time I got the kids in bed and sat down to catch up on some photography stuff, it was about 8:30. I get a call from Brian that he was on the way to the hospital. He had gotten a call of an apparent crazy person swinging a broom around a gas station, knocking stuff off shelves, and screaming that “they” were after him. Of course, my husband the shit magnet (that’s a cop term) was like one nanosecond away. He pulls in and the guy is now coming out of the gas station, sans broom, but soaked in sweat and literally foaming at the mouth. Brian gets him over to his car to try to figure out what the hell was going on at which point the guy gets all agitated. After a minor tussle, Brian cuffed him and (luckily) asked the guy if he was on any meds. The guy rambled off some med that Brian hadn’t heard of so Bri asked him what it was for. “AIDS,” the guy replies. At this point some reinforcements had arrived and Brian started to get his gloves on. The guy is getting more and more agitated and now tries to run. He gets helped to the ground and in the fight, gets a bloody nose and lip. He’s also trying to break out of the handcuffs and is slicing his wrists all up.

Not to go into too much detail, we’re now going through the post-exposure CDC protocol –

Brian doesn’t think he actually got any of this guy’s blood on him. It’s more to be sure than anything else, but it’s HIGHLY unnerving nonetheless. I’m sure he’ll be totally fine, it’s just like, ugh. The next 6 months should be pretty interesting. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

It’s been a crazy week.